overview

This collaboration between Serbian choreographer Dalija Acin and Isabelle Schad - choreographer based in Berlin - started during the project COLINA 2005, that took place in August 2005 in Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf.
The project is dealing with the notion of self-representation and the fluctuations between ’self’ and ’other’, foreign and own, female and male, outside and inside, natural and artificial, fake and real.

The project takes the shape of a solo for Dalija Acin that takes in account autobiographical aspects, discourse and theory, through a series of interviews and daily conversations about being on stage.

How many bodies do you have?
How many faces do you have?
What do you have? What do you own?
What is taken away from you?
How different can you perceive your own self from one moment to the next?
What is a fluid identity?
Do you become visible on stage?
Do you become invisible on stage?
For whom do you become invisible, for yourself or for the observer?
What kind of representation?
What kind of presence?
What is a political body?
How does your own political body look like?
What is the moment of transition revealing?

Leaving your own body behind.
Splitting voice and body.
Putting in relation language and body.
Working on transformations of your own body.
Designing a space for imagination.
Triggering and stimulating imagination.
Editing (text, body, light, sound material)
Manipulating from outside.
Manipulating from inside.
Producing illusion.
Using the stage apparatus to alter the perception of time and space.
Producing a form of spectacle that can reflect upon itself.
Using referential images as proposing again another body.
Reflecting on the self and the non-self.
Producing emotions through an anatomical body approach.
Building expectations.
Breaking expectations.
Working with the codes of beauty

"The skin is deceptive ...in life one only has one’s skin...there is an error in human relations because one never is what one has...I have an angel’s skin but I am a jackal...a crocodile’s skin but I am a puppy, a black skin but I am white; a woman’s skin but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am. There is no exception to the rule because I am never what I have." (Dangerous Connections by Bojana Kunst)

This piece, if related to the personalities and the experiences of Dalija Acin and Isabelle Schad, is more generally a work on the body - the body as an anatomic experience and the body as the object of representation.
A physical approach based on the activation of different systems (respiratory, skeleton, ligaments, muscles, fascia, fat, skin, organs, glands, nerves and fluids), on vocalization and on dynamics of perception produces manyfold different qualities of movement. This approach emphasizes the observation of the self, the awareness of what happens in one’s body in each moment
The ’looking’ - envisioning the eyes as an organ - and the observation through and from within the whole body become important elements in the process.
The perception of duration and the possibility to focus on details are there interrelated.
The collaboration of Acin and Schad questions what is given to be seen, the relation between presentation and representation, between reality and imagination, and proposes to reconsider habits in perceiving.